Sunday, February 14, 2016

Why Is the Zika Outbreak Being
Used to Legalize Abortion in Brazil?

By Julio Severo

In recent months, because of the Zika virus, which has
had a strange connection with microcephaly in unborn babies of pregnant women
in several Brazilian regions, many leftist groups, including the World Health
Organization, are calling for the legalization of abortion in Brazil, the world’s
most populous Catholic country.

But push for abortion legalization is creating a
backlash, particularly among the families of disabled children. Many have taken
to social media apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, where more than half of Brazil’s
200 million people are connected, to make their pro-life case. They argue that
all babies, including those with microcephaly, have a right to be born.

The Catholic Church and Pentecostal neo-Pentecostal
churches, which have a strong influence in this deeply religious country, have
also been fighting back efforts to legalize abortion.

“Abortion is not the answer to the Zika virus, we need
to value life in whatever situation or condition it may be,” Sergio da Rocha,
the president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (NCBB), said last
week. Nevertheless its usually leftist line, NCBB is not aligned with the Left,
even with the ruling socialist Workers’ Party (which it, through its bishops,
helped to found), in the abortion issue.

Abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, danger to
the mother’s life or anencephaly, another birth defect involving the brain. But
in practice, any unscrupulous ob-gyn office “discreetly” offers abortion to women
willing to pay. Wealthy women pay more and poor women pay lesser.

Before the microcephaly issue, leftist groups that
support abortion were on the defensive following a bill by the powerful mostly Pentecostal
evangelical congressional caucus that would restrict abortion access by adding
additional hurdles for women looking for abortion under the false flag of rape.
The bill has been approved by a House of Representatives committee.

The first case of Zika was discovered in Brazil in the
middle of last year. It’s spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, a common
household pest that also transmits dengue and chikungunya. Zika is generally
much milder, with only one out of five patients developing symptoms such as red
eyes, a splotchy rash and fever.

A link between microcephaly and Zika in Brazil has been
a mystery, because in Colombia the latest study, made available on February 13,
2016, reveals over 5,000 pregnant Colombian women are infected with the
mosquito-borne Zika virus, but there is no record of Zika-linked microcephaly
in these cases.

What has been different in the Brazilian case? Some
conjecture certain vaccines in pregnant women. Others, genetically modified
mosquitoes. And others, chemical
products to fight the Dengue virus. In each of these conjectured cases,
multimillion interests of powerful companies are at stake. And all of them will
be more than happy to blame the mosquito (and prepare a vaccine costing
millions from Brazilian taxpayers) or promote abortion, making of the unborn
babies — the main victims of the strange epidemic in Brazil — scapegoats of a
crisis of questionable origin.